Double Hamster on The Rocks

While I learned to drive the truck when I was fifteen, it was not the first time that I'd sat behind the steering wheel. Six or seven years before I traumatized what had to be a nascent gopher civilization, I'd gotten some exposure when my father, grandfather, and I used the same pickup truck to solve a tricky timbering problem. At the time we all had a tradition where my mom, grandma, sister, and younger brother would relax at the house while the three of us went out into the woods on the edge of the property and mauled ourselves with axes and chainsaws. It was my job to cut up fallen trees with a super dull mid-range axe/ hatchet that did a terrible job on hardwoods but seemed to enjoy sinking into my shin and calf whenever it got the opportunity. My father went out with a McCulloch chainsaw to slice up branches that had been brought down during the Virginia storm season and get rid of trees that were encroaching on the fields. Year after year, the encroachment zone got larger until it occupied most of the eastern half of the Virginia coast and a large zone around the James river. The rule was that, unless one of us opened an artery or had been bitten by a poisonous snake, we were not supposed to come back until everyone was bleeding.

The timbering problem followed the arrival of a summer storm which rolled over the farm, blowing two corners off of the brick chimney and tearing up the corn. Somewhere around the border of the river, near Ingleside Vineyards but within shouting distance of the large barn and the slopes where I learned to drive the truck, a walnut tree had been twisted almost in half, surrounded by vines and packed in among another set of much sturdier trees. This walnut had the potential to become what is known as a hanger: a tree that could get caught up in other trees on its way down, forcing the base of the truck to whip around and kill everyone in a two mile radius. If you got away from the trunk on the first pass, it would dress up in Halloween garb and wait outside your window until you were asleep and then it would kill you. Hangers were that dangerous. Normal people stay away from trees like this but my dad and granddad sat for a good twenty minutes in the truck, staring at the walnut and working out a way to cut the tree down while heightening the danger.

They eventually decided to get a cable and run it from the hitch at the back of the truck to some branches mid-way up the tree. My dad would cut the tree, my grandfather would supervise from the grassy knoll beside the tree, and I would step on the gas and drive straight forward on my grandfather’s signal. It was the first time that I’d ever sat in the driving seat of anything larger than the lawnmower. My track record on the lawnmower amounted to the world’s first Jackson Pollock style lawn trimming exhibition so my Dad was concerned that I drive the truck straight. “Just keep the steering wheel right here,” he said while lining the truck up “you don’t need to do anything… just keep the wheel straight and drive forward.”

I heard the chainsaw start up and then my grandfather started yelling toward the truck so I took off the brake and jammed on the gas. The truck growled to life and leapt forward like a Golden Retriever at a squirrel convention. It proceeded to bounce there, grinding against the cable until I heard the pop of the tree, which launched forward, tore through the vines and landed a good fifteen inches from where my grandfather stood. At the time, I noticed that he looked very calm but now that I think of it, he didn’t say anything from the time my father picked him up and placed his stiffened body in the cab of the truck, until about two hours after dinner when he announced that he was going to bed. We had to drive back to Pennsylvania the next day but I remember coming back a few weeks later to finish cutting up the walnut. We lasted a full three hours before my father nicked himself with the saw and I sunk the hatchet back into my leg.